Become a Design Thinker

Design Your Second Act This is a theme that describes our personal growth across the 4 regions: Comfort Zone. In this zone, we have to fight against our stronghold to create a breakthrough.  Exploration Zone,  where we identify and transform our capability assets to forage the adjacent possibilities.  Becoming Zone , where we are prototyping our new possible personas Significance Zone , where we s...

A good network will provide the necessary knowledge and support in our daily work or long-term goals. They can be someone who can give us good advice, share successful or unsuccessful experiences, and provide a safety net for us to fail small and fast. If we can build our network wisely, our network will make you thrive. Download the AI Prompts: https://become-a-design-thinker.kit.com/design-your-...

Our experience is so important, especially if you want to elevate your work to a higher level or move to a new working environment. The problem is, how can we recognize our experience instead of a list of companies' names, positions, and no. of years? And how can we let our co-worker know what our experience is? Download the AI Prompts: https://become-a-design-thinker.kit.com/design-your-seco...

Skills are about how well you can apply your knowledge in practice. Anyone can learn and apply a skill in one narrow context. But what makes us become outstanding and significant is the ability to transplant that skill to a new context and transcend it to a higher level of work. Download the AI Prompts: https://become-a-design-thinker.kit.com/design-your-second-act We are deeply grateful if you co...

How can we transform our newly acquired knowledge into our new competitive edge? In our workplace, knowledge is not what we know. It is what we can do with what we know, how reliably we can do it, and how well we can teach others to do it. Today, we will answer this question from 3 aspects of knowledge transformation. Download the AI Prompts: https://become-a-design-thinker.kit.com/design-your-sec...

After we have stepped out of our comfort zone, we may suddenly open up to a wide and clear spectrum. It seems like we can go in any direction. The problem is, where should we go? To navigate, our strategy is to identify our Capability Asset to explore our adjacent possibilities.  Today, we will touch base on three of those Capability Assets: Knowledge, Experience, and Skills. Download the AI Promp...

Everyone may have different strongholds that hold up our growth. These strongholds would blind our self-awareness, lead us to follow the repeated pattern, and lock us in our comfort zone.  Today, we have generalized different types of strongholds and discussed the strategies to tear them down. Download the AI Prompts: https://become-a-design-thinker.kit.com/design-your-second-act We are deeply gra...

Our old self is our biggest enemy to fight against if we decide to depart from our comfort zone.  We strongly believe our previous success is built on our belief system that drives our daily decision-making process. We used to believe that we had made the best choice. Although we may sometimes regret it, we still believe that our own mind is our best partner to make decisions for us. Our ME strong...

Fear influences our choices. We fear uncertainty. This dictates us choosing a familiar path and reduces our risk exposure. The consequence of not taking risks will limit our identity rebuilding. Fear shrinks vision and opportunity. Therefore, if we want to build an identity that we aspire to be, we need to control our risk exposure by design. We call this: Design our Risk Appetite. A balanced risk...

Our sunk cost stronghold is like an anchor that holds us from departing from our comfort zone. To depart, to start a new journey, we need to bring along our assets. But the problem is, our anchors and our assets sometimes look very similar. In this episode, we will discuss how to distinguish your anchor and asset, and take respective actions on them. Download the AI Prompts: https://become-a-desig...

Sunk cost is the emotional debt from when we built our first act.  Today, we’re going to look into a critical factor that will hold us back, keep us pinned to that foundation even when we know it’s time to move - The Sunk Cost Stronghold. Download the AI Prompts: https://become-a-design-thinker.kit.com/design-your-second-act We are deeply grateful if you could take a moment to share your thoughts,...

We  launch the theme in 2026:  Design Your Second Act "Design your Second Act" is a design process to help you navigate from a stagnation stage to becoming significant in your world. And we call it a design process because you can't just think your way there. You can't solve a new future with the old playbook. Design starts with empathy—for yourself and the problem you want to...

We are coming to the end of 2025. Today, we will have a special episode - a reprise of our episodes in 2025. If you want to download the diagram for the 4-stages of transformation, here is the download link: https://join.bdesignthinker.com/growth Download the AI Prompts: https://become-a-design-thinker.kit.com/design-your-second-act We are deeply grateful if you could take a moment to share your t...

Most of you will think that strengths make us thrive. Weaknesses hold us back. It is half true.  If we do not reveal the shadow of strength - our pride, our ego, our bias we will face a bottleneck at some point of our growth journey.  If we accept our weaknesses as our vulnerability and ask for help, we may achieve unbelievable results. Weakness is not a bad thing always. But lacking the awareness...

Like a fortress building on a spot that has a military advantage, where the army can easily defend the spot, our stronghold is built under the shadow of our strength, so that we are difficult to defeat.   We need to find a way to destroy our stronghold that is holding us back.  We used an analogy of a sapper to describe our strategies in tackling our stronghold.  We are fighting the enemy in our m...

Bill Shander is an author, educator, and information designer.  His courses in data storytelling, information design, and data visualization are on LinkedIn Learning and workshops around the world. He is a keynote speaker and has lectured for graduate and undergraduate students and staff at Harvard, Northeastern, Stanford, and more.  In this interview, we have a conversation around his book, Stake...

Stronghold is a mindset that prisons our growth mindset and forces us to believe that the current situation cannot be changed.  A stronghold refers to a self-limiting belief system shaped by upbringing, culture, and past experiences. It becomes a cognitive prison—a mindset that worked before but now blocks our growth, discourages risk-taking, and reinforces the idea that “things can't change”...

You are in the darkness. You don't know where to go. You feel stuck. You want to find a way out. No one cares about what you are doing. You are always being ignored or put aside. It is one of the best moments in your life. This is because no one cares about your work. You have the freedom to create something new. While no one has expectations and goal setting for you, you have plenty of time...

Silent Pitching is the art of creating influence without confrontation, guiding others without forcing them, and letting ideas grow in their hearts rather than forcing them into their ears. In this episode, we will discuss how silent pitchers pitch new mindsets to people staying in their comfort zone. We used a quadrant approach to discuss our topic. You can download the Quadrant diagram through t...

You want people to follow your ideas, become part of your creations, and form a larger community. Instead of a push, you should learn to serve. So, the simple question we should ask is,  How should we serve to multiply our creations and expand our influence? We used a quadrant approach to discuss our topic. You can download the Quadrant diagram through this link so that you can use the new approac...

You are very busy at work, but you don't know what you are doing. You cannot tell others what your job is about. You passively react to people's demands. You are not creating something at your work that you can proudly tell your family or friends. You are surviving but not thriving.  Your passion for your job is gone, and your vision to contribute to your job by what you are good at is l...

 In the last episode, we have discussed the first half of the topic:  Become a Forager: Crossing the Four Lands of Growth  Today, we will go through the second part of the episode. Become a Forager is a mindset that we do not settle in the current situation. We actively and iteratively explore, create, and learn to produce a better future than today.  We used a quadrant approach to discuss our top...

Today, we will look into this problem from the mentality of Forager.   Forager definition: a person or animal that goes from place to place searching for things that they can eat or use. Forager is like a hunter, gardener, adventurer, explorer, builder, consumer,...These multiple characteristics of Forager become interesting when we use it as a metaphor for our different stages of work and life. ...

Do you have an experience where you are not moving forward? We may have worked very hard, but gained no reward. You tried to create a breakthrough, but you don't know which direction to go. You don't have a map. You don't have a compass. And the worst is that the direction of the next step is so uncertain, like being covered by a thick layer of fog.  In this episode, we will explore...

Have you ever experienced a period of time when you were being isolated and your works were idled? You felt like you could not move forward. You might be very busy at work, but nothing valuable was created. You were struggling with different relationships without any progress. You were just wandering in the same spot. What made it worse was that you were pushed backward and could not show any impr...